Brief Biography

Renu Malhotra is a Professor of Planetary Sciences in The University of
Arizona in Tucson, where she is also serving as Chair of the Theoretical
Astrophysics Program. She earned her M.S. in Physics from the Indian
Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1983, and her Ph.D. in Physics from
Cornell University in 1988. She did post-doctoral research at Cornell and
at Caltech, and worked as a staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary
Institute in Houston. Her work in planetary dynamics has spanned a wide
variety of topics, including extra-solar planets and debris disks around
nearby stars, the formation and evolution of the Kuiper belt and the
asteroid belt, the orbital resonances amongst the moons of the giant planets,
and the meteoritic bombardment history of the planets. She has revolutionized
our understanding of the history of the solar system by using the orbital
resonance between Pluto and Neptune to infer large-scale orbital migration
of the giant planets and to predict the existence of the "Plutinos" and
other small planets in resonance with Neptune. She is an elected member of the
National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, and has been the recipient of honors and awards from the
American Astronomical Society, the International Astronomical Union,
The University of Arizona, and the IIT-Delhi.